How blind people use websites (video with Sina Bahram, blind accessibility researcher)

162 million people worldwide are blind or visually impaired at a level that does not allow to read texts. An unbelievable high, but official number. And a significant (and demographicly increasing) percentage of these people is using websites, exactly like everybody else. Communicating, shopping, news-reading, movie-watching, downloading stuff. These who are not using the web live under poorest conditions, are very old ((semi-)blindness is a typical senior’s desease) or have serious mental handicaps. This leads to a very interesting question: How do blind people use the web – and what can we (as developers) do to make blind people’s web activities much easier ?

This video shows (one possibility of) how blind people use the web; note that this really sympathic guy (Sina Bahram, an accessibility researcher, find his twitter feed here) reads everything in an awesome speed – much faster than non-blind people are able to read websites (!). Sina also shows a hard-to-read page, full of HTML table markup used for layouting, not for showing a real table. This is probably the best example ever to prove why it is and always was bad to use tables for HTML layouts. Excellent stuff, every developer should see this.

The situation of readable websites is by the way, as far as I know, not as bad as it sounds (literally!): Because HTML was built to be readable by machines. The problem is when developers misuse HTML tags, creating websites in a visual way, not in a technical-structual one, or when JavaScript is used to do more than just “additional” stuff (more on that in another article). The W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 from 1999 give an nice insight into how accessable sites should really be like, this guideline here also shows how to optimize websites for screenreaders, take the time and read this, just one time, because it’s important.

Interesting side-fact: Did you ever wondered why most websites of public services, like governments, universities, police, NGOs, etc. look like back in 1996 ? Exactly! Because they are as accessable as possible! No JavaScript, no fancy layout, just pure information. And by the way, here in Germany we have really strong Inclusion laws that oblige developers to make websites of public services 100% accessable for everybody. A correct step! With the rise of JavaScript this will become critical, as dynamic page content is hard to read and hard to put into context. This is super-interesting, when there’s time, then I’ll write a follow-up article on this topic.

For further reading: http://accessibleinsights.info

And another interesting YouTube clip: How blind people use the Web (shows usage of Facebook!)

Final note: I think I broke a lot of accessablity guidelines within this article. If blind or visually impaired people read this: Sorry guys, I promise that my next article on this topic will go deep into details and fulfil every possible accessability rule. ;)